RESEARCH ARTICLE
Inter-rater Reliability of Sustained Aberrant Movement Patterns as a Clinical Assessment of Muscular Fatigue
Frank Aerts1, 3, Kathy Carrier1, 2, Becky Alwood*, 3
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 125
Last Page: 134
Publisher ID: TOORTHJ-10-125
DOI: 10.2174/1874325001610010125
Article History:
Received Date: 25/11/2015Revision Received Date: 16/03/2016
Acceptance Date: 04/04/2016
Electronic publication date: 27/05/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Background:
The assessment of clinical manifestation of muscle fatigue is an effective procedure in establishing therapeutic exercise dose. Few studies have evaluated physical therapist reliability in establishing muscle fatigue through detection of changes in quality of movement patterns in a live setting.
Objective:
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the inter-rater reliability of physical therapists’ ability to detect altered movement patterns due to muscle fatigue.
Design:
A reliability study in a live setting with multiple raters.
Participants:
Forty-four healthy individuals (ages 19-35) were evaluated by six physical therapists in a live setting.
Methods:
Participants were evaluated by physical therapists for altered movement patterns during resisted shoulder rotation. Each participant completed a total of four tests: right shoulder internal rotation, right shoulder external rotation, left shoulder internal rotation and left shoulder external rotation.
Results:
For all tests combined, the inter-rater reliability for a single rater scoring ICC (2,1) was .65 (95%, .60, .71) This corresponds to moderate inter-rater reliability between physical therapists.
Limitations:
The results of this study apply only to healthy participants and therefore cannot be generalized to a symptomatic population.
Conclusion:
Moderate inter-rater reliability was found between physical therapists in establishing muscle fatigue through the observation of sustained altered movement patterns during dynamic resistive shoulder internal and external rotation.
